We celebrate 50 years of ”Saturday Night Live“! This whole week we are digging into the late evening comedy institution with new stories, including lists, essays, interviews and more.
The last ‘Saturday Night Live ”sketch to get viral – Or at least the latest that several of this writer’s own friends sent to him – was the kind of joke you could easily find by scrubbing Gay Stan Twitter. In a section in December 2024 of the revered skis comedy series, Jane Wickline ran to Weekend Update to sing a song about Sabrina Carpenter. Or, as she entertained it in advance, a song where she is Sabrina Carpenter who regrets how no one creates lesbian rumors about her as her comrades Olivia Rodrigo or Taylor Swift.
The sketch turned out to be a bit polarizing: many (maybe older) did not get it, while others recognized the feeling of humor directly: a younger, pop culture-pilled, very online, very gay sensitivity. It is a comic tone that has become increasingly a hallmark of the long-lasting NBC series as it ages into its golden anniversary.
Over his story, ”Saturday Night Live“Have had something of a rocky path with how it has contacted the Queer culture on the show – not very surprising for a show that also had a long history of being a predominantly straight white male boy’s club. The series introduced their first LGBT role members relatively early in their driving, during season 11 1985 -Terry Sweeney was the first gay role member (his husband, Lanier Laney, was also on the writing staff), and Danitra Vance was the first lesbian on the show, also If only Sweeney was out during their short -lived terms of office.
Both tenants were unfortunately very Short-lived: Season 11, Lorne Michael’s’ return to the Showrunner position after several years away, was a notorious failure, and both were released at the end of the season along with most of the Buzzy Cast members, which included Robert Downey Jr., Joan Cusack and Anthony Michael Hall.
In any case, none of them had great experiences on “SNL.” Vance (which unfortunately died from breast cancer in 1994) was reportedly dissatisfied with the various stereotypical black female characters she played throughout her run on the show, which included parts as a teenage mother called “Cabrini Green Jackson.”
Sweeney had similar complaints: in a 2015 InterviewHe said that the writing team did not know how to give him material, and that “everything they put me in was either gay or in move.” In the book “Live from New York: The Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live”, it is alleged that the former role member became worth Chevy Chase Sweeney for homophobic bullying during his episode on the show and struck a sketch where the role member played an AIDS patient.
After Vance and Sweeney left the show, it was almost three decades before the show contained another open gay artist in its role. And the show’s humor, when it ever (rarely) was aimed at gay, tended to chip and mockery. There were some bright spots (sketch 1991 “Schmitt is gay,” A parody of oversexualized beer advertising is quite harmless), but there were also notoriously offensive depictions that have aged very poorly. There was the notorious “Canteen Boy Goes Camping” Sketch from 1994, which contained Alec Baldwin as a scoutmaster who called on Adam Sandler’s recurring character, generated significant controversy from viewers who thought it was homophobic and made light of pedophilia. During his time at the show, Cheri Oteri had a recurring character called “Mickey The Dyke”, which was mostly just a collection of wide stereotypes rather than something that is anchored in reality. A sketch 2011 rested its entire punchline on the idea that transgender people took estrogen treatments.
Other sketches and characters that are significantly more loved and delighted today came today fell into the trap of having the only punch line rather than slightly deeper. “The ambiguous Gayduon”, which ran off and in 1996 to 2011, was a sketch based entirely on the condition to guess whether the titular couple was gay or not. Bill Hader’s beloved weekend update character stedphone played a little more in queer culture with its recurring piece about “New York’s hottest club”, but at the end of the day it was still a caricatur of a gay man mostly written and performed by straight men.
It was not until 2012, when Kate McKinnon was added to the show as a player on Season 38, that “SNL” got his second open gay role member (and first open lesbian role member). Unlike Sweeney or Vance, McKinnon was not pigeon during her time at the show: on the other hand, she was undoubtedly the biggest star in the series for her long time and did everything from political imitations like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren to silly original characters as a chain jewelry foreigner theorist.
About that time – and as support for homosexual rights, and culminated in legalizing in 2015 by gay marriage – more gay writers went to the show’s writing staff. The most remarkable was Chris Kelly, who joined the show as staff writer in 2011, was promoted to supervisor in 2014 during the show’s 40th season and eventually became headwriter with his writing partner Sarah Schneider during the 42nd season, which made him the first open Gay Head author of the program During his term of office, he wrote many sketches for McKinnon and Aidy Bryant, including the silly Buddy Duo Comedy Parody “Dives and fats,” or the memorable, generally loved and very safish 2017 Totinos Pizza Roll Super Bowl -Parody In the lead role Kristen Stewart.
In the mid-2010s, more and more prominent LGBT writers on the staff began to emerge, especially Julio Torres, whose surreal, offbeat humor resulted in some cut sketches from 2016 to 2019 as the beloved, queer-tented “wells for boys, “Or “The actress,” Who played Emma Stone as a method actress in a gay porn. Written by Queer writers, the sketches also feel noticeably more authentic gay: surely still uses queerness in their humor but digs deeper into real queer experience.
In 2019, author Bowen Yang was promoted to a role member on the air after a year as a writer on the show. Since his employment, other openly gay role members have become more ordinary employees, including Punkie Johnson and Molly Kearney, the first non -binary role member of the show (both have then left “Saturday Night Live.”) Such as McKinnon, Yang – which has been relatively Well known for several years thanks to his successful podcast “Las Culturistas”-now undoubtedly the most well-known current member of the role (outside the longest rented Kenan Thompson), and certainly the most busy outside the show, with roles in roles in blockbuster as ” Wicked. “
Yang’s employment saw a noticeable change in sensitivity to the show, which began to get involved more often with a certain type of chronic online queer humor. One of the earliest examples were they funny (and for networks TVshockingly dirty) “Sara Lee” Sketch from 2019, who saw Harry Styles play a gay trainee for the baked good company that accidentally leaves thirsty tweets from the company, which gave us the immediately Meme-worthy phrase “must get rid of toxic in society.” Then there are sketches that rice on pop culture’s ephemera like “M3gan” and its popularity with the queer community, which clearly comes from someone who has spent hours browsing through and reading Twitter. It may be something that the show takes warmth for (ripping off Twitter has really become a common accusation that people can fee on “SNL” sketches), but you can say that sketches like these and one throws Travis Kelce as a Gay’s low -receiving straight male friend Coming from someone with a sharp eye on the Queer culture.
For all the progress “Saturday night live” has made in queer humor, the show is not perfect, and its queer representation is not either. The most notorious continues the show to the court’s controversy by often inviting comedians Dave Chappelle, who has become known for often transphobic jokes in his sets, on the show twice since his controversial special “The Closer.” In 2024, the show also attracted attention when Shane Gillis hosted the show; Gillis, notoriously, was hired and then fired from the role of 2019 after Internet users revealed several racist anti-Asian and homophobic jokes from his podcast. Allowing the comedian, even temporarily, five years later, felt like a backslide in the worst way. And while the show now has plenty of queer writers and artists, there are still gaps in its representation, including Zero Trans Stars on his record.
Still, progress can be made, and “SNL’s” Track Record – from an overwhelming straight program to one of the most reliable gay programs on television – is more than proof of that.
